The Gate was still there in the morning.
Kaelen had half expected it to be gone — registered overnight, cleared by an early patrol, sealed by the Gate Authority before he could do anything useful with it. But when he turned into the alley on his way to school, it was exactly where he'd left it. Shimmering against the brick wall. Blue and thin and quietly wrong.
He stood at the alley entrance for three seconds.
Then adjusted his bag on his shoulder and walked in.
The cave was the same.
Low ceiling, damp stone, bioluminescent moss painting everything in pale blue. The smell of something organic underneath the rock — sweet and slightly rotten, like fruit left too long in a closed room.
He'd been here yesterday. He knew the layout. He knew what was inside.
He moved quietly through the first passage, one hand trailing the wall, eyes adjusting. His footsteps made almost no sound. Not technique — not yet — just the instinct of someone who had spent years moving through spaces that punished noise.
The goblins from yesterday were gone. Regenerated back to their spawn points, probably. F-Rank dungeons cycled fast.
He found them in the same chamber. Five of them. Same cluster of glowing ore. Same immediate hostility when they caught his scent.
This time he didn't pick up a rock.
He just stood there and let them come.
The first one reached him in four seconds.
He stepped left. Two centimetres. The goblin's claws passed close enough to catch the air beside his ear and he brought his hand down precisely on the mana node at the back of its neck — visible to him as a dim pulse under grey-green skin, like a bulb behind frosted glass.
The goblin dropped.
The second came from his right. He pivoted without looking, two fingers finding the node behind its jaw before the creature had finished its lunge. Down. The third came low and fast and he let it get closer than was comfortable, watching the mana rhythm — the way it surged unevenly toward the chest before an attack, how it left the extremities briefly dim — and timed the strike to that exact moment of internal imbalance.
Down.
The fourth hesitated. Smarter than the others, or just more cautious. It circled him, watching with small yellow eyes.
Kaelen watched its mana flow.
There. A flicker of intention before the body committed. He could see it the way you see a muscle twitch before a punch — the energy gathering, redirecting, the node at the shoulder brightening half a second before—
He stepped inside the attack and pressed his thumb into the node with exactly enough pressure.
Down.
The fifth turned and ran.
He let it go.
Four goblins on the cave floor. Breathing. Intact. Temporarily blind to every drop of power they had, like a city during a blackout — all the infrastructure still there, just dark.
Kaelen looked at his hands.
No blood. No mana expenditure. No System notification chiming to tell him he'd done something worth recording.
Just silence and four unconscious goblins and the quiet satisfaction of a body that remembered how to do something it had spent a lifetime learning.
The first time, he thought, it took me three years to understand mana node strikes. And I had to figure it out alone.
This time it's Tuesday.
The System found him while he crouched examining the second goblin's node pattern.
He heard it before he saw it. The familiar two-tone chime — ascending, polite, utterly indifferent to context. The blue light assembled itself in the air in front of him with the calm persistence of something that had never been told no.
[NEW HUNTER DETECTED] [SCANNING...] [MANA SIGNATURE: NULL] [RANK ASSESSMENT: ERROR — INSUFFICIENT DATA] [PHYSICAL COMBAT METRICS: ANOMALOUS] [CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWN ENTITY] [PLEASE CONTACT YOUR LOCAL SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR]
He stared at it.
Unknown Entity. Last time it had just said Error. The System was trying harder now. Maybe it remembered him too, in whatever way a System remembered things.
The window pulsed. Patient. Waiting.
"I don't need your permission," he said.
He dismissed it with two fingers.
It resisted — a fraction of a second longer than yesterday, the blue light stuttering, trying to reassert — and then collapsed into nothing.
He stood up and went deeper into the cave.
The mana core was exactly as he'd left it.
He crouched in front of it in the small back chamber and studied it properly this time. Both hands resting on his knees. Eyes tracking every detail.
The size of a closed fist. Surface like dark crystal, fractured. The cracks ran in a pattern that wasn't random — they followed the core's internal mana channels, which meant the degradation was happening from the inside out. Not external damage. Internal pressure failure.
He watched the leak rate for two full minutes. Measured it against his memory of the last timeline — the cores he'd seen near the end, when everything was already failing and the data was useless because there was no time left to use it.
This one was early stage. The leak was small. Consistent.
Fixable, something in him said.
He knew the technique. He'd developed it himself in the last timeline — too late, with too few people who understood it, applied to too many cores simultaneously collapsing under the accumulated pressure of years of negligence.
Here it was one core. One alley in Seoul. One Tuesday in March.
He reached toward it.
Stopped.
His chi flickered gold between his fingers — responding to the proximity of raw mana the way a compass needle responds to a magnet. Eager. Instinctive.
But he pulled his hand back.
Not alone.
The technique required sustained chi output from multiple points simultaneously. A single practitioner could stabilise a core temporarily. Actually repairing the internal channel damage — sealing the cracks at a structural level — required coordination he couldn't provide alone. Two people minimum. Three was better.
He didn't have two people.
He didn't have one.
He stood up and looked at the sick core for a moment longer — its arrhythmic pulse, its quiet continuous leak, its small faithful contribution to the two percent that everyone in Seoul had already decided was acceptable variance.
I'll come back for you, he thought.
Then he walked back through the cave, past the four unconscious goblins and the empty space where the fifth had fled, through the cold pressure of the Gate boundary and back out into the alley.
Seoul received him without ceremony.
Morning traffic. A food cart starting up on the corner. Somewhere a Hunter guild van moving through the intersection with its indicators on, unhurried, headed toward whatever the day's assigned Gate clearance was.
Kaelen stood at the alley entrance and looked at his empty palm.
The chi was still there — faint and gold and warm, tracing the lines of his hand like something learning its own shape. It lasted a few seconds. Then faded back under the skin.
He thought about the core. About the leak rate. About two percent becoming four becoming the cliff edge nobody saw until they were already falling.
He thought about the last timeline — standing in the ash, alone, the only sound his own boots in the silence of a dead world. The specific weight of being the last thing left. How it had felt less like survival and more like being forgotten by the ending.
I carried it alone last time.
He closed his hand.
I watched everyone I knew turn to dust and I thought the weight of it made me strong.
It just made me the last one.
"I need allies," he said quietly. Not to anyone. To the palm. To the city moving around him like it had somewhere to be.
He unclenched his fist.
Adjusted his bag.
Walked out of the alley toward school.
He was going to be late.
He didn't particularly care.
But somewhere between the alley and the school gate, between the thought and the pavement under his feet, something else settled into place beneath the quiet resolution.
The world has seven months before it starts noticing.
I have seven months to not be alone anymore.